Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Wait just a minute, Internet! Wasn't the second Ghost Rider movie as directed by the terrible couple of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (shouldn't they have a better shared director name like "The Explosion Twins", by the way? Neveldine/Taylor doesn't really cut it.) supposed to be utterly dreadful?

To my surprise, I found myself highly entertained by the film's silly shenanigans and its clever dumbness when I finally dared watch it. Of course, my enjoyment of Ghost Rider: SoV might have something to do with lowered expectations, seeing as I did not expect anything from the directors of the overrated and annoying Crank movies and the improbably horrible Gamer, and surely not a movie that gets the dubious allure of Marvel's Ghost Rider character. That allure, as if I need to tell anyone, is that of a bad metal album cover; we are, after all, talking about a biker with a flaming skull on his shoulders riding a burning motorcycle, hitting people with chains and eating souls.

SoV gets that, and so mostly consists of CGI Rider doing appropriately burning and chainy things while clichéd guitar noises play on the soundtrack. Because that sort of thing might get boring once in a while, the directors also delight us with some nonsensical mythology (OMG! The Ghost Rider was the angel of justice before he was dragged into hell and corrupted by a diet of flashing TV violence!), dumb-clever quips, and Idris Elba as a French alcoholic religious bad-ass fighter.

And then there's Nicolas Cage. Clearly, the only directorial advice Neveltaylor (that's better, isn't it?) had for Cage was to tell him "go insane", so that's what he did, gibbering, grunting, chewing and spitting his absurd lines with the greatest enthusiasm while pulling his face into various monkey-like positions. It's quite a performance, even in a career that is as full of all-out scenery slaughter as that of Cage.